Advent Week 1 Recap
Patience & Faithfulness
Happy Saturday to you. Today ends the first week of Advent. We spent three days each on two of the fruit of the Spirit: Patience (Hope) & Faithfulness. We will leave Saturdays to review and catch up if you missed any posts or want to dig deeper on one of them (the titles are linked below). If nothing else, read again our passage from Galatians, included in full at the end of this post.
Tomorrow is the second Sunday of Advent.
We’ll begin with the fruit of Peace,
which is the traditional theme for this Sunday,
and then Wednesday dig into Goodness.
Patience (Hope)
An Old Man’s Patience: Anticipation shaped by decades - Simeon’s waiting becomes our hopeful posture.
Waiting with Expectation: Hope is a seed planted in dark soil - we water, trust, and wait for God’s timing.
A Persistent Woman: Hope that refuses to settle for silence - faith in action under injustice.
By the way, my first recording finally hit Spotify:
Faithfulness
Belief AND Fidelity: Faith and faithfulness are two names for the same root - allegiance, not just assent.
When He Saw Their Faithfulness: Church-life carried on the shoulders of loving, persistent friends - community bearing one another to Jesus.
Abiding in Faithfulness: Staying in Christ is how the vine bears fruit - fidelity yields life.
Galatians 5:13-26
You were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only don’t let this freedom be an opportunity to indulge your selfish impulses, but serve each other through love. All the Law has been fulfilled in a single statement: Love your neighbor as yourself. But if you bite and devour each other, be careful that you don’t get eaten up by each other!
I say be guided by the Spirit and you won’t carry out your selfish desires. A person’s selfish desires are set against the Spirit, and the Spirit is set against one’s selfish desires. They are opposed to each other, so you shouldn’t do whatever you want to do. But if you are being led by the Spirit, you aren’t under the Law. The actions that are produced by selfish motives are obvious, since they include sexual immorality, moral corruption, doing whatever feels good, idolatry, drug use and casting spells, hate, fighting, obsession, losing your temper, competitive opposition, conflict, selfishness, group rivalry, jealousy, drunkenness, partying, and other things like that. I warn you as I have already warned you, that those who do these kinds of things won’t inherit God’s kingdom.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against things like this. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the self with its passions and its desires.
If we live by the Spirit, let’s follow the Spirit. Let’s not become arrogant, make each other angry, or be jealous of each other.